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List Price: $25.95Price: $1.99 You Save: $23.96 (92%)Prices subject to change.
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 782.42164092
EAN: 9780679463085
ISBN: 0679463089
Label: Villard
Manufacturer: Villard
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 512
Publication Date: August 03, 2004
Publisher: Villard
Release Date: August 03, 2004
Sales Rank: 928516
Studio: Villard
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Crosby, Vallee, Columbo. They are their own trinity. Bing is the universal dad. Rudy the misbehaving son. That leaves Russ. The holy ghost.
New York, 1931: The curtain falls on the Ziegfeld Follies, a victim of the rising popularity of talking pictures; Rudy Vallee, radio’s wildly popular “Vagabond Lover,” worries that increasingly sophisticated microphones and Hollywood-minted heartthrobs will make his megaphone-amplified vocals passé; a pugnacious, hard-drinking baritone named Bing Crosby cleans up his act, preparing to take America by storm on CBS radio; and handsome twenty-three-year-old Russ Columbo, a former violinist dating a Ziegfeld girl, makes his debut on NBC radio.
In an America poised to take its dominant place on the world stage, the Crooner points the way forward. With his heated core of sex appeal wrapped in well-tailored layers of cool distance and cigarette smoke, the Crooner brings something new to the country’s self-image: this is no Yankee-Doodle Dandy, but a suave and seductive figure, sophisticated as any European, flush with youthful strength and energy. It’s all there in his voice, his croon: a soft, intimate, sensual form of singing that combines jazz sensibilities with the smooth and danceable rhythms of the Big Band sound and Swing.
But who would embody the new archetype? Vallee crooned too soon. That left Crosby and Columbo to duel it out over the airwaves. Hailed as “The Romeo of Radio” and “The Valentino of Song,” romantically linked to actresses Pola Negri and Carole Lombard, Columbo is all but forgotten today, his limitless promise cut short in a tragic and controversial accident as he stood on the verge of winning the stardom that Crosby, his great rival, would soon achieve.
In this impressionistic tour-de-force–a musical history combining the drama of a bestselling novel and a soundtrack from the Golden Age of Broadway and Hollywood–master musician and critic Lenny Kaye trains a spotlight on Columbo while crooning a love song to an earlier America–a pitch-perfect evocation of one of the most romantic, creatively exuberant periods of our past–an era whose influence still burns brightly in the music and popular culture of today.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
If you are looking for serious biographical info on Columbo or other male popular singers of the 30s, there are several books (Lou Miano's ground-breaking Columbo bio is tops) available right here on Amazon that will fill that need.
Kaye may love the mystique and voice of Russ Columbo, but he loves his own voice even more, and his bizarre rambling present-tense musings detract from the narrative. I also dislike invented dialogue that belongs in the realm of fiction, not biography. Check ... Read More
Rating:  -
Loved the book, loved the writing, loved the story. It should be a movie!
Rating:  -
This book is a tremendous source of information about the entertainment industry in the first half of the 10th century.
The central character is Russ Columbo, a man of incredible talent who died tragicly at the start of his ascent to stardom. The book
weaves in the stories of udy Vallee, Bing Crosby, Carol Lombard
and dozens of super stars from that period. Reading it inspired me to search for early films by many of these people and view them.
A wonderfull experience. However, ... Read More
Rating: -
if you enjoy: rimbaud. verlaines(p et t). ferlinghetti. woolfe. ginsberg. reed. dylan(with a z). or smith(with a p a t t i): then you are in for a major bon-bon! A few thoughts:
the subject coulda been anything and i'd love it as much. his writing's a delight: a view into a mind constantly sparking.
this guy has more than 1 axe.
sure, i'm a child of my times and find it easy to relate to the way mr kaye perceives the universe. so what?
i won't buy my 87 yr old mum a ... Read More
Rating: -
Looking for an interesting read on the crooners, I was disappointed with the pretentious, erratic, and sometimes unintelligible writing style of the author. Perhaps there was interesting information buried somewhere in the half-sentences, fictional areas, and the "stream of semiconsciousness," but I was too put off and bored by the writing style to slog through it past the first 40 pages.
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